Service Desk AI Takes ITSM Ticket Assignment To The Next Level

What managerial task is more important than finding the right people for a given job?

The IT service desk is no different. Though a capable service desk solution should provide smart enhancements for achieving peak operational efficiency and assisting support team members, utilizing intelligent automations to delegate critical ITSM activities like ticket routing can make a huge difference in improving the quality of service without faltering on speed and flexibility.

Consequences of ticket misalignmentFirst, let's take a look at what happens when a service desk fails to assign tickets to the right people:

Drives up costs per ticket: Achieving quality service at high speeds doesn't come cheap these days. Between 2006 and 2015, the average cost per service desk ticket to the organization rose nearly 28 percent, according to an HDI study. On the service desk, time is money, and organizations simply cannot afford to skip out on strategy when assigning tickets.

Time to resolution increases: Part of what drives up the aforementioned cost includes the resources and labor expended in resolving a ticket that has spent far too long in progress. Assigning to the wrong team or staff user can slow down operations, keeping the organization from decreasing its resolution times.

Customer satisfaction dives: Today's end users expect their requests to be met in record times. When wires cross and assignments aren't disseminated properly, processes slow down, which can keep customers waiting.

Burdens go unbalanced: All these issues aside, managers also can't place every difficult request on the shoulders of a few experienced workers. How will rookies learn the ropes? How will veterans get anything done?

To counteract these problems, IT organizations are introducing AI for the service desk to support their ITSM solutions. By using technology like big data and machine learning, today's service desks rely on innovative new ways to better manage ticket routing.

Innovation through smart delegationWho has the bandwidth to take on a new request? Who has the experience? Who has had success with similar tickets in the past? Service desk AI can approach these questions the same way a manager might, but with the advantage of being able to quickly process and mine insights from a vast trove of historical data to assign tasks with speed and accuracy.

Knowledge through contextLeveraging smart automations helps to take some of the guesswork out of ticket routing. For IT managers that want better context for which staff users are best suited to handle a given incident or request, AI for service desk can immediately pull from thousands of past records and company data, and recommend the best available options. This gives management more context for the organizational support team's daily activities, so they can better plan and prioritize for the future.

Improved ticket routing is just the tip of the iceberg. With the support from constant, iterative learning mechanisms, service desk quality optimizes and grows smarter with every passing ticket. And as the knowledge and context of an entire ITSM team expands and insights are made actionable, everyone's path to excellence becomes more readily achievable.